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Mission

Ladiesintech.com serves to help and encourage women to speak at tech conferences!

I registered this URL in 2009. I had no clue what I was going to do with it, but I did know two things:

I like technology

I like being a lady

With those two things in my tool belt, I started off to make a site. I brainstormed a lot over the past few years (many thanks to Kenny Meyers and Yesenia Perez-Cruz for listening to a bunch of my ramblings). I had huge, you might even say grand, ideas. I installed a CMS, started creating user groups; there were profiles and dynamic pairing generators. It was getting intense and becoming a site that tried to solve every problem that was ever written about involving women and technology. So I took a step back and decided to focus on female speakers in the tech field. Talking this over with Yesenia, we identified these major goals and sections for the site.

1. Showcase Featured Articles

You guessed it: articles on experience in speaking in public from ladies in the tech field with positive outcomes. A major goal here is for any article published to focus on solutions. We know there are issues on the subject; it’s important to identify them and different ways to solve them.

2. Curate Resources

While we can certainly use the Googs to find out what’s out there, we’d like to create and maintain a curated list of resources (videos, books, techniques) that have helped ladies in public speaking. Emphasis on curation.

3. Provide a Monthly Topic

When you talk to people about why they aren’t into public speaking, a lot of the answers involve not knowing where to start or what to talk about. The Monthly Topic aims to solve that. We give you a topic, a time limit and some primary and secondary goals. You create a short presentation on it. You pair up with another partner or two or fives and share it! Either in person, through Skype, an uploaded video, or our Vimeo channel. The presentations will be short and help provide a starting point for practice. We’ll provide you with a form you can use to collect feedback from your partners if you’d like.

We want to give y’all a short bit of time to get familiar with the site and join the message board before putting the first topic up here. Will be coming shortly though, so get moving!

4. Create an encouraging Message Board

Want to find another lady to present your monthly topic to? Join the message board and find someone available at a common time to practice with. Or are you looking to share advice or ask for some with some other ladies in the field? Post that too! The Message Board requires registration as well as a required form field to tell us why you are looking to join. We are doing this to prevent trolling and negativity. We really want to provide a positive, trusting place for ladies to be able to talk to each other. Want a juicier experience? Different strokes, right? Domize tells us trollsintech.com is totally available.

5. You say Cilantro, I say Ladies

Speaking of different strokes, the internet is FULL, I mean it, FULL of specialized sites for people with different interests. Dog lovers, cat lovers, jugglers who do sudoku. The same way that this dude loves supporting cilantro, we love supporting ladies. A site celebrating and encouraging cilantro doesn’t mean we don’t also like basil. The same goes for a site celebrating and encouraging ladies in tech. We love all tech nerds, but we’ll leave that up to the rest of you to make those sites. This is our go at a specialized site. And if one day this content becomes too capacious, then look for us to make a site supporting female, cat-loving developers living in Pennsylvania, cause that’s on the short list.

Want in?

Do you have a positive story you want to share? Is there a treasured resource that improved your speaking career that you would write a review about? Contact us with an idea! We’d love to hear from you! The more voices we share, the better.